A Transportation Enterprise

The transportation enterprise aims to transform over a hundred stations, several thousand turnstiles, and several hundred semi-auto ticket machines across the whole metro line networks. To achieve this goal, it launches an AFC Transfer Payment System Upgrading project. This project includes the following sections: engineering investigation and design, ACC system transformation, AFC system transformation across over ten metro lines, network transformation of all metro lines, transfer payment platform construction, and aggregation node construction.

The transportation enterprise needs to build a cloud platform to achieve the following targets for its business:

• Use the virtualization technology to replace the traditional physical server-based IT infrastructure to achieve resource reuse, improve resource utilization, and save the overall IT cost.

• Use automation and self-service capabilities to improve resource activation efficiency and lower O&M costs. In addition, use configurable resource delivery models to match business-driven demand for resources and thus avoid resource wastes. 

• Construct a simple and intelligent cloud platform that provides underlying support for its business system. The cloud platform needs to provide diversified, easy-to-use, and simple O&M features that can satisfy daily O&M business requirements. This way, O&M personnel can have more time and energy to focus on business upgrading and innovation and thus yield more business values.

To satisfy the preceding business requirements, the transportation enterprise launched full investigations and testing and did large-scale case study verification. In the end, it chose the simple and stable ZStack Cloud platform to serve as its underlying IT infrastructure. Multiple x86 servers are used to construct a compute resource pool. FC-SAN storage is used to provide a backend storage pool for the cloud platform. In addition, NAS storage is used for the upper-layer PaaS platform to provide persistent storage for clusters where VM instances are running.

• Higher server resource utilization 

The virtualization technology of the ZStack Cloud platform integrates physical resources and reduces the number of physical servers. In addition, it increases the available resources that can be used in actual scenarios, reduces server room resources, and lowers investment costs.

• Better business service quality

The high availability, hot migration, and other resource scheduling features of ZStack Cloud improves the IT infrastructure O&M efficiency and ensures the stability of the upper-layer PaaS platform and business system operations.